The Art of Writing, Robert Louis Stevenson [e reader .txt] 📗
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should combine pleasure and profit to both parties, and be at once
agreeable, like fiddling, and useful, like good preaching.
This is to speak of literature at its highest; and with the four
great elders who are still spared to our respect and admiration,
with Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning, and Tennyson before us, it would be
cowardly to consider it at first in any lesser aspect. But while
we cannot follow these athletes, while we may none of us, perhaps,
be very vigorous, very original, or very wise, I still contend
that, in the humblest sort of literary work, we have it in our
power either to do great harm or great good. We may seek merely to
please; we may seek, having no higher gift, merely to gratify the
idle nine days’ curiosity of our contemporaries; or we may essay,
however feebly, to instruct. In each of these we shall have to
deal with that remarkable art of words which, because it is the
dialect of life, comes home so easily and powerfully to the minds
of men; and since that is so, we contribute, in each of these
branches, to build up the sum of sentiments and appreciations which
goes by the name of Public Opinion or Public Feeling. The total of
a nation’s reading, in these days of daily papers, greatly modifies
the total of the nation’s speech; and the speech and reading, taken
together, form the efficient educational medium of youth. A good
man or woman may keep a youth some little while in clearer air; but
the contemporary atmosphere is all-powerful in the end on the
average of mediocre characters. The copious Corinthian baseness of
the American reporter or the Parisian chroniquear, both so lightly
readable, must exercise an incalculable influence for ill; they
touch upon all subjects, and on all with the same ungenerous hand;
they begin the consideration of all, in young and unprepared minds,
in an unworthy spirit; on all, they supply some pungency for dull
people to quote. The mere body of this ugly matter overwhelms the
rare utterances of good men; the sneering, the selfish, and the
cowardly are scattered in broad sheets on every table, while the
antidote, in small volumes, lies unread upon the shelf. I have
spoken of the American and the French, not because they are so much
baser, but so much more readable, than the English; their evil is
done more effectively, in America for the masses, in French for the
few that care to read; but with us as with them, the duties of
literature are daily neglected, truth daily perverted and
suppressed, and grave subjects daily degraded in the treatment.
The journalist is not reckoned an important officer; yet judge of
the good he might do, the harm he does; judge of it by one instance
only: that when we find two journals on the reverse sides of
politics each, on the same day, openly garbling a piece of news for
the interest of its own party, we smile at the discovery (no
discovery now!) as over a good joke and pardonable stratagem.
Lying so open is scarce lying, it is true; but one of the things
that we profess to teach our young is a respect for truth; and I
cannot think this piece of education will be crowned with any great
success, so long as some of us practise and the rest openly approve
of public falsehood.
There are two duties incumbent upon any man who enters on the
business of writing: truth to the fact and a good spirit in the
treatment. In every department of literature, though so low as
hardly to deserve the name, truth to the fact is of importance to
the education and comfort of mankind, and so hard to preserve, that
the faithful trying to do so will lend some dignity to the man who
tries it. Our judgments are based upon two things: first, upon
the original preferences of our soul; but, second, upon the mass of
testimony to the nature of God, man, and the universe which reaches
us, in divers manners, from without. For the most part these
divers manners are reducible to one, all that we learn of past
times and much that we learn of our own reaching us through the
medium of books or papers, and even he who cannot read learning
from the same source at second-hand and by the report of him who
can. Thus the sum of the contemporary knowledge or ignorance of
good and evil is, in large measure, the handiwork of those who
write. Those who write have to see that each man’s knowledge is,
as near as they can make it, answerable to the facts of life; that
he shall not suppose himself an angel or a monster; nor take this
world for a hell; nor be suffered to imagine that all rights are
concentred in his own caste or country, or all veracities in his
own parochial creed. Each man should learn what is within him,
that he may strive to mend; he must be taught what is without him,
that he may be kind to others. It can never be wrong to tell him
the truth; for, in his disputable state, weaving as he goes his
theory of life, steering himself, cheering or reproving others, all
facts are of the first importance to his conduct; and even if a
fact shall discourage or corrupt him, it is still best that he
should know it; for it is in this world as it is, and not in a
world made easy by educational suppressions, that he must win his
way to shame or glory. In one word, it must always be foul to tell
what is false; and it can never be safe to suppress what is true.
The very fact that you omit may be the fact which somebody was
wanting, for one man’s meat is another man’s poison, and I have
known a person who was cheered by the perusal of Candide. Every
fact is a part of that great puzzle we must set together; and none
that comes directly in a writer’s path but has some nice relations,
unperceivable by him, to the totality and bearing of the subject
under hand. Yet there are certain classes of fact eternally more
necessary than others, and it is with these that literature must
first bestir itself. They are not hard to distinguish, nature once
more easily leading us; for the necessary, because the efficacious,
facts are those which are most interesting to the natural mind of
man. Those which are coloured, picturesque, human, and rooted in
morality, and those, on the other hand, which are clear,
indisputable, and a part of science, are alone vital in importance,
seizing by their interest, or useful to communicate. So far as the
writer merely narrates, he should principally tell of these. He
should tell of the kind and wholesome and beautiful elements of our
life; he should tell unsparingly of the evil and sorrow of the
present, to move us with instances: he should tell of wise and
good people in the past, to excite us by example; and of these he
should tell soberly and truthfully, not glossing faults, that we
may neither grow discouraged with ourselves nor exacting to our
neighbours. So the body of contemporary literature, ephemeral and
feeble in itself, touches in the minds of men the springs of
thought and kindness, and supports them (for those who will go at
all are easily supported) on their way to what is true and right.
And if, in any degree, it does so now, how much more might it do so
if the writers chose! There is not a life in all the records of
the past but, properly studied, might lend a hint and a help to
some contemporary. There is not a juncture in to-day’s affairs but
some useful word may yet be said of it. Even the reporter has an
office, and, with clear eyes and honest language, may unveil
injustices and point the way to progress. And for a last word: in
all narration there is only one way to be clever, and that is to be
exact. To be vivid is a secondary quality which must presuppose
the first; for vividly to convey a wrong impression is only to make
failure conspicuous.
But a fact may be viewed on many sides; it may be chronicled with
rage, tears, laughter, indifference, or admiration, and by each of
these the story will be transformed to something else. The
newspapers that told of the return of our representatives from
Berlin, even if they had not differed as to the facts, would have
sufficiently differed by their spirits; so that the one description
would have been a second ovation, and the other a prolonged insult.
The subject makes but a trifling part of any piece of literature,
and the view of the writer is itself a fact more important because
less disputable than the others. Now this spirit in which a
subject is regarded, important in all kinds of literary work,
becomes all-important in works of fiction, meditation, or rhapsody;
for there it not only colours but itself chooses the facts; not
only modifies but shapes the work. And hence, over the far larger
proportion of the field of literature, the health or disease of the
writer’s mind or momentary humour forms not only the leading
feature of his work, but is, at bottom, the only thing he can
communicate to others. In all works of art, widely speaking, it is
first of all the author’s attitude that is narrated, though in the
attitude there be implied a whole experience and a theory of life.
An author who has begged the question and reposes in some narrow
faith cannot, if he would, express the whole or even many of the
sides of this various existence; for, his own life being maim, some
of them are not admitted in his theory, and were only dimly and
unwillingly recognised in his experience. Hence the smallness, the
triteness, and the inhumanity in works of merely sectarian
religion; and hence we find equal although unsimilar limitation in
works inspired by the spirit of the flesh or the despicable taste
for high society. So that the first duty of any man who is to
write is intellectual. Designedly or not, he has so far set
himself up for a leader of the minds of men; and he must see that
his own mind is kept supple, charitable, and bright. Everything
but prejudice should find a voice through him; he should see the
good in all things; where he has even a fear that he does not
wholly understand, there he should be wholly silent; and he should
recognise from the first that he has only one tool in his workshop,
and that tool is sympathy. {13}
The second duty, far harder to define, is moral. There are a
thousand different humours in the mind, and about each of them,
when it is uppermost, some literature tends to be deposited. Is
this to be allowed? Not certainly in every case, and yet perhaps
in more than rigourists would fancy. It were to be desired that
all literary work, and chiefly works of art, issued from sound,
human, healthy, and potent impulses, whether grave or laughing,
humorous, romantic, or religious.
Yet it cannot be denied that some valuable books are partially
insane; some, mostly religious, partially inhuman; and very many
tainted with morbidity and impotence. We do not loathe a
masterpiece although we gird against its blemishes. We are not,
above all, to look for faults, but merits. There is no book
perfect, even in design; but there are many that will delight,
improve, or encourage the reader. On the one hand, the Hebrew
psalms are the only religious poetry
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